17 User Feedback Questions to Ask for Amazing Customer Insights

You should grow a product and get new customers. You don’t know what to do first or prioritize. You’re unsure whether to invest in new features, double down on customer and user experience, or hire more people.

But there is one secret and a shortcut to getting ahead, no matter what type of business you run: customer feedback. Customer feedback can help you make important business decisions, retain existing customers, acquire new business, and grow revenue when collected and used properly.

When taking the first step to getting started with user feedback, you need to know what to ask your customers. Today, we’ll uncover the best user feedback questions you can use immediately to collect valuable customer feedback around your product or service.

What is the main reason you’re using our product?

As business owners, marketers, and product managers, we can often completely miss the actual reasons customers purchase from us. Usually, we believe it’s because we have a superior product or service that beats the competition on some level, but the reality can be completely different.

This question will reveal the true motivations and emotions of customers that come and purchase from you. Beware that the answers will vary depending on whom you ask. A customer can sign up wanting to solve one problem and decide to remain a customer because of something completely different.

What made you choose our product when comparing it against the competition?

Competitive insights can give you a pretty good idea of where you stand against your competitors, but once again, the reality could be vastly different. This is a superb question to ask if you want to find out what really makes your customers pull out their credit cards. In terms of the right time to ask this, it would be immediately after purchasing, be it a SaaS subscription or a physical item.

What was the main reason you did not purchase from us?

Not every prospect turns into a customer, and that’s okay. Not everything is lost, though; every opportunity missed is an opportunity to learn from negative feedback. Ask your potential customers about the things you were missing or did not do well that made them turn to the competition. 

Inquire about why they went with a competitor just decided not to use a product like yours. This question comes up often in sales calls, but you can also ask it after a customer doesn’t proceed after a booked demo or a similar situation.

If you could add ONE feature to make our product better for you, what would you add?

Feature requests are the building block of great product management and collecting effective customer feedback. However, you can get pretty wild feature requests that come in massive numbers. By asking your customers for just one feature they would add, you’re making them put their thinking caps on and choose an option with the most impact.

If you could remove ONE feature to make our product better for you, what would you draw?

Finding bottlenecks and pain points in your product can be a wild goose chase with customer feedback. Don’t look at the analytics - just ask users about the single item they would remove immediately to get more value from your product or service.

The great thing about this question is that it doesn’t let your customers go into long rants about what works and what doesn’t work. Instead, they need to focus and think about their product and customer service experience, deciding on the one thing with the biggest impact.

What’s the worst thing about our product or service?

If you’re ready to face some harsh truth when collecting user feedback, this can be a great question to gain valuable insights. In case you’ve already run an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, and you know who your detractors are, they make a specifically suitable type of audience for this question. You can reveal what irks your customers the most and where the most friction occurs. It’s not the silver bullet to solve all problems, but it can help tell you where to look first.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to people you know?

This classic NPS question can reveal a wealth of user feedback and information about how a customer feels. Most importantly, NPS (net promoter score) is super easy to quantify and track over time and you can easily look up your product’s NPS score against your industry benchmarks.

As we’ve written extensively, sorting your customers into buckets with detractors, passives, and promoters is not just an exercise - it can bring great insights. Even more crucial is that it can show you which actions you need to take immediately and with which customer group.

Where did you first hear about our product or service?

One of the ultimate ways to keep your customer acquisition costs at bay is to focus on the right platforms where most of your customers come from. If you spend enormous amounts of money on Facebook ads and stats show that customers come in from SEO and content marketing, it’s a sign to change your direction and listen to your customer feedback.

The biggest benefit of this question is that it can show you a disparity between what you think brings in new customers against what actually brings in new customers. This is a lifesaver if you don’t have proper attribution methods set up.

What motivated you to evaluate us compared to the competition?

You might produce a lot of content and have many touchpoints with your customers. Landing pages, demos, articles, emails, ebooks, whitepapers, brochures, you name it.

With this question, you can find out which product is particularly effective in getting customers to evaluate your product or service. It’s a superb customer feedback method to streamline your marketing and sales efforts and lower customer acquisition costs.

In general, how satisfied are you with our product or service?

This is a question that your customers can answer on a scale, and it’s the typical CSAT (customer satisfaction) survey question that you need to ask continuously. Even if you feel like your customers are extremely satisfied with your offering, CSAT customer surveys should take place at regular intervals. If nothing else, you get an excellent basis for comparison and you might reveal some great insights along the way.

How often do you use our product or service?

Sure, you can use analytics to find out this piece of information. However, it doesn’t ask to hurt your customers about their thoughts too. If you make this a rated question on a feedback survey, you can ask subsequent questions. If someone doesn’t use the product offers frequently, you can ask follow-up questions to find out what would make them use it more regularly, just by using customer feedback.

How would you rate the value that you get for the money that you pay for our product?

Pricing can be one of the most common objections and reasons for customer churn. Keep tabs on how your customers feel about the money they pay. You may even get surprised by this customer feedback and realize that you can ask for a price increase based on the value you provide.

How difficult was it to use our latest feature?

Rated on a scale from 1 to 10, this is a typical CES (customer effort score) survey question. If you just launched a new feature or an important page on your website, ask customers how hard it was for them to interact with it.

You can discover bottlenecks quite easily with this customer feedback method. And with a feedback survey tool such as Survicate, you can embed these customer feedback surveys in your web or mobile app with just a few clicks

How satisfied are you with our customer service?

This is a question that doesn’t get asked enough and it’s a shame because it can reveal many missed opportunities with customer feedback.

In an age where competing on features is simply not sustainable, you can compete on the basis of customer service and provide a superior customer service experience. To know what to aim for, the best thing to do is simply to ask for customer feedback. You can make this a rated question around your product or service (on a scale from 1-10) or an open-ended question, depending on whether you want qualitative or quantitative customer feedback. Sometimes though, it's best to let the satisfied customers use their own words.

How likely are you to shop from us again?

If you run an eCommerce store, or any store from that matter, you know that getting a repeat purchase from a customer is much easier and cheaper than acquiring a new customer. You can ask this question immediately after purchase and see if the customer has any comments about the customer experience. Whether good or bad, you can use a tool such as Survicate to reward their good (or bad) rating with a coupon for a discount, a special offer or something else.

Moreover, this can show you all you need to know about customer loyalty.

If you could describe our product or service with one word, what would it be?

Building a brand doesn’t have to be hard - you can just use customer feedback. Sometimes though, your customers perceive you in a completely different way than you would want them to. This is a great practice for your marketers who can use customer feedback to write more compelling copy, choosing the exact words that make all the difference and drive conversions rather than shooting in the dark.

Was it easy to find what you were looking for?

This is a pretty simple customer feedback question that can reveal a lot. Your user experience can either significantly help in pointing the customer right where they need to go or it can hinder them on the way. It’s a handy question to ask when a customer converts from a visitor to a free trial, from a free trial to a paid customer or something similar.

Wrapping up

Great customer experience comes from communication and showing your customers that you care. Asking these customer feedback questions may seem like a chore, but it’s actually nothing to be afraid of. Especially nowadays, when customer feedback questions can be automated so that you get the answers you need, when you need them. And most importantly, you can ask them in a way that doesn’t disturb your customers.

Does this sound like a dream come true for your user feedback initiative? Then you should sign up for Survicate and start sending contextual customer surveys to your customers today. You can ask the questions that matter and collect answers in a way that unveils a goldmine of data. Net promoter score, customer satisfaction, or any other type of survey - we have your back. Sign up today to get started!